Research on ATI-CAL for accelerating FBP reconstruction

Accelerating CT reconstruction algorithms with general purpose GPU has attracted plenty of attention in recent years. Many researchers have studied the techniques of implement CT reconstruction algorithms on different GPUs and different code development environment to explore their capability and performance of acceleration. This work is to investigate the performance of stream computing of filtered backprojection (FBP) using an ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card. CUDA and ATI stream computing are two main platforms in the field of high performance computing with general purpose GPU. ATI has released a set of development toolkits including a high-level brook+ based on C/C++ and a low-level Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL). We have investigated the performance of Brook+ in our former work. Here, we study the performance of ATI-CAL in the acceleration of CT reconstruction algorithm, and compare it with other GPGPU techniques.